source: Patrick McCurdy, ed.

, The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet, expanded

digital edition (Grand Forks, ND: Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2018)

Seeing Oil
KYLE Conway

0. Zoom

There’s a book I like to look at with my kids called Zoom (Banyai

1998). I say “look at” rather than “read” because it has no words.
Instead, it’s a series of pictures, each taking up a page, that work to-
gether to create the effect of zooming out. On the first page, you see
some red triangles, and then, a page later, you see it’s really a chick-
en, and the triangles are its comb. A page later, it’s a chicken seen
through a window as you look over some kids’ shoulders. Then it’s
the kids looking at the chicken, seen through a door behind them.
You keep zooming out until it’s the entire earth, and then, on the final
page, the earth disappears into the vastness of space.
What’s nifty about The Beast is that it can work a bit like Zoom.
You can look at the picture it paints, literally and figuratively, and
then take a step back, then another and another. In the process,
you come to see something in our day-to-day experience that is of-
ten invisible: oil. Of course, it’s not that we can’t see oil. We see gas
stations. We buy gas. Perhaps a bit spills and we carry its acrid smell
around with us all day. Rather, it’s that we don’t see oil. We tend not
to think about the tanker that brought the gas, nor the refineries that
purified it, nor the pipelines that carried oil to the refineries, nor the
wells where people took the oil out of the ground. Nor do we think
about the plastic that trims our car’s interior, nor the tar in the as-
phalt we drive on, nor any of the other materials we have thanks to
oil and the technology we use to process it. When I say oil is invisible,
this tendency to overlook it is what I mean.
 What makes it invisible? Perhaps it’s that oil has caused people
to do terrible things they would rather not acknowledge: “the history
of oil,” writes Amitov Ghosh (1992, 29), “is a matter of embarrass-
ment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic.” Perhaps it’s
that oil is so energy-dense and produces such a high Energy Return
on Energy Investment (EROEI), to borrow a term from Antti Salminen
and Tere Vadén (2015, 34), that it erases any markers of its pres-
ence:

Simply put, the high EROEI of oil and the large amount of oil to-
gether intoxicated the human ape so that it started imagining
that the effects of oil were due to the ape’s own merits. It started
to see a combination of virtue and natural determinism as the
roots of its prowess.

Or perhaps it’s just that oil is so thoroughly imbricated in our lives

that we take it utterly for granted. As long as our lives run smoothly,
we focus on the tasks that secure our survival from one day to the
next, or on the leisure we enjoy when those tasks are done. We lose
sight of oil in the same way we lose sight of the ball in the prestidigi-
tator’s hand, through misdirection and distraction.
The Beast helps bring oil back into focus. It recounts a modern
parable about the tensions people in North America experience,
some more acutely than others, around issues of energy, sustain-
ability, and the need to make a living. It also provides a collection
of art inspired by real-life public relations campaigns in the past few
decades. The art provides a comment on (and thematic counterpoint
to) the story The Beast tells about people working in a public rela-
tions firm.
To see the value of this metacommentary—and to see oil—we
must now zoom out.

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1. Impasse

The Beast presents its readers with two protagonists: Mary, who
works for a company that designs PR campaigns for the oil industry,
and Callum, an anti-oil activist who subordinates his freelance PR
work to his ideals. Both have to make compromises: Mary shares
Callum’s idealism, but she knows it won’t pay the bills. Callum lives
by his ideals but, in many ways, proves Mary right: he can afford his
idealism only because Mary spots him rent and buys him dinner. In a
very real way, oil money pays for his anti-oil activities.
Throughout The Beast, we find ads that Mary’s company has pro-
duced. One for the fictional company OilCan is interesting for the
light it sheds on the compromises Mary and Callum make. It depicts
a mother holding a rambunctious kid wearing a birthday hat while a
girl with a balloon yells behind her and another blows a noisemaker
into the flame of one of the candles on a cake. The mom looks tired.
The caption reads:

Polymers. Fertilizer. Neoprene. You’re not thinking about all the

ways petroleum makes your birthday party possible. And you
don’t need to. OilCan is there, every step of the way, to make your
dream a reality. From cake to balloons, from party hats to plastic
chairs, we’ve got you covered. Just don’t ask us to help with the
cleanup! (p. 21)

Many readers of The Beast are likely familiar with the type of ad
this one parodies. Exxon Mobil’s “Energy Lives Here” campaign and
Enbridge’s “Life Takes Energy” campaign, both from the 2010s, used
a similar strategy—listing all the things oil allows us to take for grant-
ed—but these ads have a long history. In the 1950s, the American
Petroleum Institute, for instance, published a series of “educational”
pamphlets in the same vein with titles such as “What Makes This

xiii
Nation Go: The Story of One Industry, Oil, and How It Fits into Our
American Economy” (see Talbot 1958 and Huber 2014). These ads
demonstrate the degree to which our lives (and those of the charac-
ters in The Beast) are saturated in oil, but in a paradoxical way: the
ads draw our attention to oil and then relieve us of having to think
about it any more. We’ve got you covered: it’s a remarkable feat of
legerdemain.
Jennifer Wenzel (2016) uses this idea as the starting point for an
exercise in her environmental humanities classes. She calls it the
“oil inventory,” and she asks students to “trace the presence (or ab-
sence) of oil and its history in their own lives” (ibid., 32). The exer-
cise “offers a kind of inoculation against that too-easy depoliticizing
gesture of pointing out energy hypocrisy ... as if anyone who drives
or flies or eats Kellogg’s cornflakes forfeits the right to wonder and
worry about fossil fuels” (ibid., 32). The Beast makes this gesture
twice. When Callum’s self-righteous activist friends accuse Mary of
selling out, she confronts them: “Do you even know what your phone
is made of? And your shoes, your clothes, oil is in all of them, you
hypocrite!” (p. 75). Later, Mary is idly looking at her computer and
sees a meme depicting activists in canoes on a lake with the cap-
tion, “Protest oil companies / Coats, lifejackets and kayaks all made
of oil” (p. 80). It’s a subtler moment, but the point is still clear: what
right do people have to critique the very system that makes their
activism possible?
This conundrum is a symptom of what the Petrocultures Research
Group (2016, 18) identifies as an “impasse”: “Oil is so deeply and
extensively embedded in our social, economic, and political struc-
tures and practices that imagining or enacting an alternative feels
impossible, blocked at every turn by conditions and forces beyond
our understanding or control.” This is the place where Mary and Cal-
lum are stuck. Callum’s activism is funded (albeit indirectly) by the
very industry he objects to. And to travel to Fort McMurray (where

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he takes the video of workers that will cost Mary her job when he
publishes it), he still has to take a car. He might protest oil, but he
cannot escape it.
But this realization needn’t lead to paralysis. Another approach
is possible:

Rather than understanding impasse as foreclosure of possibili-

ty, we posit that impasse is a situation of radical indeterminacy
where existing assumptions and material relations can no longer
hold or sustain us and in which we might activate the potential
obscured by business-as-usual. In this case, an impasse is not a
blockage; it is a condition of possibility for action within a situa-
tion that is suddenly open because it is uncertain. (Petrocultures
Research Group 2016, 18)

How do we act in this case? We take a step back. We perform an

oil inventory. To get a better grip on our situation (in hopes of doing
something about it), we zoom out.

2. Inventory (part 1)

Here are some places where oil is present but invisible in The Beast:
• Callum walks home from an art gallery opening. Mary walks
home from her job. (p. 24)
• The next day, Mary leaves for work. (p. 26)
• Callum rides his bike to a protest, and cars driving the other
way honk. (p. 28)
• Mary arrives at a restaurant after work to meet Callum, who is
already there. (p. 32)
• Callum is back at home after the restaurant. (p. 36)
• The next day, Mary goes to work again. (p. 37)

xv
 This list is nothing more than the first half-dozen times people
travel from one place to another. It would be tedious to list every
time someone travels (especially when Mary and Callum take buses,
trucks, and taxis to get to and around Fort McMurray), although the
tedium would reveal the banality and ubiquity of travel.
Even this initial list, however, starts to make oil consumption vis-
ible. It’s obviously fueling the cars Callum passes as he rides his
bike. But it’s also in the act of biking itself. Although biking doesn’t
consume oil or gas directly, it does so indirectly. Plastic or vinyl parts
are made with ethylene, which is derived from oil. Parts are trans-
ported from one place to another—in trucks, we might assume—as
bicycles are assembled, and finished bikes are transported to the
stores where people buy them. And to fuel their bikes, people have
to eat. The global industrial food system, with its petroleum-derived
pesticides, its transport boats and trucks, and its plastic packaging,
consumes oil at nearly every stage. Environmental scholar Daniel
Thorpe has even calculated the rate of carbon dioxide emissions per
kilometer traveled by bike, as a result of the consumption of oil in the
production of food. He estimates that an average North American
biking one kilometer burns about 25 Calories (or 0.11 megajoules).
People who follow a meat-heavy paleo diet are responsible for about
135 grams of CO2 (or its equivalent) in that distance. (The production
of meat requires a lot of oil because of the pesticides in grains grown
for feed, not to mention the transport involved in getting animals to
slaughterhouses and meat to supermarkets.) People who eat a more
conventional diet are responsible for about 65 grams, while vegans
are responsible for about 40 grams. In comparison, gas-fueled cars
consume about 750 Calories (3.3 megajoules) per kilometer and
emit 300 grams of CO2 (Thorpe and Keith 2016). Biking reduces oil
consumption, to be sure, but it does not eliminate it.
Similarly, we can see oil in Mary’s walking, too. If she is wear-
ing comfortable shoes, they likely have soles made of polyurethane

xvi
foam (derived, again, from oil). The sidewalk she is walking on likely
contains asphalt, which is a form of bitumen. And she, too, must
eat food. Given her body size, she probably burns about 50 Calo-
ries (0.22 megajoules) per kilometer (Bumgardner 2017). If the pro-
portions Thorpe proposed hold true for walking, that’s roughly 130
grams of CO2 per kilometer, depending on what she’s eaten.
These examples all demonstrate a phenomenon sociologist An-
thony Giddens (1990, 21) calls disembedding, or “the ‘lifting out’ of
social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restruc-
turing across indefinite spans of time-space.” For Giddens, the ab-
straction disembedding represents is a defining characteristic of mo-
dernity. People in advanced, globally integrated economies maintain
relationships with others who are far away—the people who extract
oil, those who transform it into pesticides, those who use those pes-
ticides to grow crops, those who deliver food in its raw form to facto-
ries for processing, those who deliver processed food to wholesalers
and then to retailers, then to restaurants, and then finally to Mary
and Callum as they eat their vegan wings and drink their beer—even
if they are not conscious of those relationships. This abstraction
contributes to oil’s invisibility. Disembedding, or “con-distancing” as
Salminen and Vadén (2015, 3) describe it, is a “particular way of
keeping something close so that it at the same time stays alien, at
a distance.”
Here is what we’ve done so far. First we looked at Mary and Cal-
lum’s world from their perspective, where they realize the ways their
choices are constrained. Then we zoomed out and looked at them
from above, from our perspective as readers looking in on a fictional
world. Now let’s zoom once more, to look over our own shoulders as
we read The Beast. What does our oil inventory look like?

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3. Inventory (part 2)

The higher-level perspective that interests me is concerned with one

thing: the amount of oil consumed in producing and delivering one
copy of The Beast. And not just any copy—I’m thinking about the pa-
per copy I hold between my hands as I write this essay. (If you’re
reading this essay, it means you have the version published by the
Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Perhaps you’re read-
ing an electronic version. Perhaps you ordered a print-on-demand
copy from Amazon. In either case, the math will be different.)
Determining the amount of oil consumed in the production of a
book involves a lot of speculation about variables whose values are
largely unknowable. The answer I arrive at is interesting more for the
sense of magnitude it provides than for the precision of its figures.
My approach derives from the one used by Sougandhica Hoysal
(2014), who calculates the energy consumed in the production of
one copy of Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil (2014). I reproduce
Hoysal’s analysis here but change the variables to reflect production
of The Beast.
Hoysal begins by addressing a vexing problem in this type of anal-
ysis, namely where to draw the line with respect to what to include or
exclude. She includes the conception, printing, and transportation of
a book to warehouses, but excludes the manufacture of component
materials such as paper. I have done the same thing.
With respect to conception, Hoysal (2014, 204) estimates that
the 90,000 words in LeMenager’s book, composed on a Dell desk-
top computer, took about 1,800 hours to produce. Over the course
of those hours, the computer consumed about 500 kilowatt-hours
of electricity (or about 1,800 megajoules, or 430,000 Calories). The
Beast, of course, is a different type of project. Although it grew out of
scholarly research, it is not a monograph—it is a collaborative work
of fiction. It took shape initially in Patrick McCurdy’s research, which

xviii
has also resulted in the Mediatoil archive (www.mediatoil.ca), and
the work of composition was distributed across a network of servers
and personal computers. The calculation of the amount of energy
used is thus not as tidy, but it is likely to be on a scale similar to Le-
Menager’s book. For that reason, I’m using the same estimate, but
instead of distributing the total energy use across 600 copies (the
initial print-run of Living Oil), I am distributing it across 2,000, the
initial print-run of The Beast by Ad Astra Comix. Each book thus took
about 0.9 megajoules (or 215 Calories). (How much of this energy
was generated by burning fossil fuels is tough to say. Electricity in
Ottawa, where McCurdy works, is generated in part by hydroelectric
dams. But what about the servers where versions were stored as he
and his collaborators worked together?)
Production is a bit simpler. Hoysal (2014, 204–205) writes that
the amount of energy used to print a book varies considerably by
“the types of printing processes and machinery used”; she uses
0.11 kilowatt-hours (0.4 megajoules or 95 Calories) as her per-book
figure. I do the same.
Distribution is a bit more complicated. Ad Astra’s printer is based
in Louiseville, Quebec, and after printing, the books were delivered
to a warehouse in Ottawa, Ontario, about 300 kilometers away. The
amount of energy used depends on the type of vehicle, as Table 1
describes:

xix
 If we add these figures together, we see that between 1.8 and
2.9 megajoules (420 and 680 Calories) of energy went into produc-
ing and delivering my book to me. There are of course other factors
we could consider that would change these results. Some would
raise our estimate, such as if we considered the energy that went
into producing the book’s component parts, especially paper. (The
manufacture of paper is energy-intensive.) Others would lower our
estimate, such as if we took into account the other cargo the trans-
port car or truck likely had, or if we found a way to reflect the fact that
electricity can be generated without burning gas or oil. The number
of factors grows as we look beyond conception, production, and dis-
tribution, a fact that explains Hoysal’s choice to limit her analysis to
those three aspects.
Are these caveats enough to jeopardize the validity of my conclu-
sions? I don’t think so. The real value of this analysis is that it allows
us to make comparisons. For instance, the amount of energy used
to produce and distribute one copy of LeMenager’s book was more
than ten times the amount used for my copy of The Beast because
of the distance traveled and the number of copies in the print-run:
a copy of Living Oil traveled almost four times as far as my copy of
The Beast, and that energy consumption was distributed over 600
copies rather than 2,000. In addition, this accounting exercise lets
us make other types of comparisons, too. Hoysal provides a fascinat-
ing benchmark, that of a hamburger on a North American plate. The
manufacture and transport of the ingredients for one hamburger
take an average of 13.6 megajoules (or 3,200 Calories). (The person
eating the hamburger might get only one tenth of those Calories in
his or her meal!) Compared to a hamburger, my copy of The Beast
took about one fourth the energy to produce and deliver.

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4. What we see

The calculations that are part of the oil inventories presented here,
first of Mary and Callum within the storyworld of The Beast, then of
my copy of The Beast itself, are indices of oil use, but they do not
provide a map or a flowchart. They make oil use visible, but not in
a step-by-step way. Their real value lies in the tools they provide to
make sense of the different, interrelated dimensions of our current
state of impasse. They reveal the dialectical relationships between
structural factors that shape how objects move from one place to
another and individual trajectories that specific objects take.
These relationships help explain the ambivalence Mary and Cal-
lum (not to mention readers of The Beast) feel about the need to
balance long- and short-term goals. Mary and Callum need to eat
and keep a roof over their heads, but the choices they make to be
able to buy food and pay rent contribute to an economic and indus-
trial system that is not sustainable. And in any case, their individual
choices can have only a limited impact, in so far as they leave the
structural organization of an oil-based economy intact. The Petrocul-
tures Research Group (2016, 18) reframes this impasse as a point
of “radical indeterminacy” to address that constraint: rather than
paralysis, we should opt to write new rules altogether. Somewhere
between paralysis and radical newness, people will need to find the
collective will to act.
The strategy of the taking an oil inventory or of zooming out has
the benefit of helping us situate ourselves and our choices within
the broader set of forces that structure our lives. It helps us weigh
different options (do I eat a hamburger or buy a comic?) by gaining a
broader sense of their impacts. Ultimately, this strategy, by causing
us to look for oil in our lives, can help us organize a collective re-
sponse to the challenges of sustainability.

xxi
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